Can Tim Berners-Lee Save The Web From The Platforms That Ate It?
The Verge’s interview with Sir Tim Berners-Lee reads like a reunion tour for an invention that accidentally empowered its future monopolists.
Tim is still the web’s conscience. He champions decentralisation, open standards and user control of data through Inrupt and the Solid spec.
He talks up personal AI agents and the long-promised Semantic Web, where machines parse meaning rather than scrape vibes. It is inspiring.
It is also running into the same brick wall that stalled the open web the first time: incentives.
The modern internet runs on enclosure. Search tilts to AI summaries that hoard attention.
Social traffic is throttled by engagement feeds. Foundation models hoover up content that was published for people and repackage it for bots.
None of that is reversed by worthy standards alone. It changes when users, developers and advertisers find more upside in open protocols than in closed funnels.
Solid is a credible attempt to shift those economics by letting people store data in personal pods and grant services permission. In theory, that makes privacy a feature and portability a default.
In practice, it needs tooling that is easier than Google sign-in, business models that reward interoperability, and regulators that force portability to be real rather than performative.
The W3C era of broad, voluntary alignment was a product of a less financialised web. Today’s giants will not give up rents without a push.
Tim’s optimism about AI assistants is the most plausible on-ramp. If agents are genuinely user-side and run against personal data stores, the open stack has a shot. If they are just another cloud endpoint, the web becomes a substrate that feeds proprietary models with free training data.
The web was built by people who believed “this is for everyone”. Keeping that promise now will take law, code and new incentives, not just nostalgia for the home page.
